––––––––
Nami flipped the laptop over on her desk and inspected the back. Roughly a third of the computer was either gone or mangled beyond all hope of repair. Huxx had told her that Smith’s men had tried to blow it up.
No shit, Sherlock, she’d said.
Drew had told everyone to leave her office, which she’d begun calling her Forensic Palace of Digital Love Making. He’d explained that the busted piece of crap in her hands was the only hope they had of finding Ashley. The despair in his voice had twisted Nami’s gut.
She loved to give Ashley a hard time almost as much as she loved anime, and that was saying a lot. The big bastard had a soft spot in her heart, though she would never dare tell him that. Knowing Smith had him made her want to bawl. Being the oddity that she was made it difficult for Nami to make friends. Her sharp tongue and lowbrow vocabulary didn’t help.
Ashley treated her like a friend—like one of the guys. That meant more to her than she would have ever admitted to anyone, let alone his gigantor ass. He didn’t see her as a super weirdo. Well, he did, but he was even more bizarre, so he didn’t pass judgment the way everyone else did. He gave her a hard time, sure, but that was why she liked him.
Ashley was her friend, by gods, and that cock holster Smith wasn’t going to hurt him. Not on her watch.
The hard drive bay on the back of the laptop was empty.
They’d taken it before attempting to destroy the rest of the computer. If the Tolbert woman had connected the thumb drive to her PC before Smith’s men had arrived, then any files she’d opened might have been recoverable. Without the hard drive, however, the odds of getting any actionable evidence on it were almost nonexistent.
“Balls.”
Nami reached for a small case on her desk and slid it in front of her. She opened it, revealing a screwdriver set. The tips ranged in size from small to ridiculously tiny. They had Phillips, hexagonal, straight, and everything in between.
After wiping dust and soot away from the back of the computer as best she could, Nami leaned close to it. A handful of screws on the back remained in place, keeping the remnants of the cover attached.
Nami grabbed an appropriately sized screwdriver and worked at loosening the screws. The damage done to the case had wedged them in place, making them difficult to remove.
“Fuck it.”
Nami dropped the screwdriver and grabbed part of the case that stuck into the air. The plastic had cracked and warped from the explosion. She pulled as hard as she could, attempting to pry it away from the motherboard and chassis.
The screw in the middle popped out and the case yanked several inches back. She stuck her hand under it and pushed up. The plastic creaked and popped as it slowly pulled away.
As she peeked inside the computer, Nami noticed there appeared to be minimal damage to the internal components. So minimal that she stopped yanking on the case for a moment and thoroughly examined the edges of the motherboard. There were a few singe marks, but nothing appeared to be melted or even chipped. The external shell and the screen of the laptop had taken the vast majority of the damage.
Chunks of the LCD screen had fallen free as she’d carried the laptop to her desk. That combined with the condition of the case made her assume the thing was totaled.
But maybe not.
Afraid that tearing the back cover off could actually cause damage, Nami stopped pulling and grabbed the screwdriver again. Removing the screws without stripping the slits in the head proved difficult. The tool kept slipping.
Grunting, cursing, and sweating, Nami worked at them carefully, applying as much downward pressure as she dared. Her fist pumped in the air when the final one came free.
That was the easy part.
She removed the back cover, tossed it to the floor.
With the guts of the computer exposed, she could see the motherboard, DC power jack, memory card reader, RAM, cooling fan, and...
“The RAM!”
Nami bit her lip as she stared at the tiny chip of memory.
While she considered herself a super-mega boss in the wonders of digital forensics, she specialized in software more than hardware. She was competent in the space, but not as proficient as she was at working around encryption and finding back doors into operating systems.
Grabbing information from a hard drive was relatively easy. A hard drive, solid-state drive, or flash drive’s data was mostly static. A novice could do it. But extracting data from DRAM, or dynamic random-access memory, which was used by consumer laptops, was a different ballgame. DRAM was volatile memory that lost its information almost instantly when a computer was powered down.
The data usually disappeared in seconds to minutes.
She’d heard about a few techs being able to extract information from RAM by freezing the chips and then removing them from a computer quickly. If they could keep them cool while inserting them into one of their forensic machines, they could sometimes see what the user was working on before the computer had been shut off.
Freezing the memory chips could retard the process by several more minutes at best. It had been more than an hour since Tate and company had acquired the mangled computer.
But Nami had a hunch. A hunch and a hope. If Christie Tolbert had put her computer to sleep rather than turning it off, and the battery in the laptop had a full charge, then the RAM might still have power running to it.
When an operating system went to sleep, most of the power-hungry components were shut off and the machine state was stored in the RAM. A small amount of juice supplied to the RAM kept the data contained there from erasing so the computer could wake up quickly.
So if Christie had opened a file from the thumb drive on the laptop, and if she’d put it to sleep and it hadn’t suffered too much damage from Smith’s men, then Nami had a chance to find something. But that was only if she could find a way to keep the memory chip cool while she extracted it from the motherboard.
That was a lot of ifs and a dearth of hope.
Nami cracked her knuckles as she stared at the open computer.
“How do I freeze your bitch ass?”
Ice wouldn’t work. Electronics had a rocky relationship with water. She drummed her fingers on the desk as she inspected the office. A tall fan sat in the corner, blowing into the open side of a desktop computer. She had two graphics cards in there, hammering away at a distorted surveillance video. The image quality of the video neared that of something recorded by a sponge, so Drew had asked her to clean it up a bit. The extensive computing had the tower churning out a ton of heat.
The fan wouldn’t be cool enough for freezing the RAM.
She needed something frigid.
Three cans of compressed air sat atop a safe where she stored the remnants of the hard drives recovered from Smith’s old computer servers.
“Yeah!”
Nami hopped off the chair and skipped to the safe. She could just reach the top of it and grab one of the cans. She used these for cleaning dust out of the fans in the computers and for clearing sandwich crumbs from her keyboards.
When held upside down and sprayed, the air and liquid coming out got damn cold.
She hurried back to her desk and kicked the chair out of the way. It rolled on the plastic mat, smacking into the far wall.
One of the computers she used as a forensic machine sat at the corner of the desk. She mostly used desktops because of how much more powerful they were, but she kept two laptops on hand for when she had to use equipment not easily compatible with desktops.
She slid the laptop toward her, flipped it over, and removed the back cover. Because of the purpose for the computer, she never put the screws in the case so she wouldn’t have to waste time removing them every time she had to try something. With a quick glance, she verified the components were compatible with the smashed laptop.
That was the first in a series of hurdles.
If this would work, she had to move quickly. Even with the RAM frozen by the compressed can of air, the data would degrade faster than made her comfortable. There was one shot at getting this right.
She pulled the RAM sticks out of her forensic laptop and placed them on the desk. After opening a case that held the physical disks of all of her forensic software, Nami grabbed a DVD she’d made with a tiny Linux tool. It allowed her to boot a minimal operating system that she used for dumping the contents of hard drives from suspect computers. She’d never used it for copying data off RAM, but she knew it had the capability.
Nami put the disk in the optical drive of her forensic machine.
She looked to the ceiling.
“Please, gods, let this work. Ashley is a tool bag, but he’s my tool bag. I want him back.”
Nami flipped the can in her hands and held the nozzle toward the ram.
“Come on, ya wanker. Give Momma some suga.”
She sprayed the air back and forth over the RAM stick. A film of frost covered it as she continued to coat it using her left hand while covering her right with the sleeve of her shirt. Without stopping the spray, she reached down with her covered fingers and plucked the stick free.
As she quickly moved the component to the next computer, Nami chewed on her lip and hoped that all the ifs required for her plan to work would fall into place.